TSMC employees know plenty of information about Apple’s demand for chips
TSMC let seven employees go for leaking confidential information
TSMC’s rules covering employee investments were said to be violated by the employees. The seven also failed to comply with the foundry’s work schedules.
The chip maker said that the workers fired were canned because they violated the company’s “core values.” One report said that the information leaked involved chip orders placed by the foundry’s customers and was passed along to outsiders. In a statement, the company said, “TSMC always operates on the company’s most important principles of integrity and integrity, so employees must follow these core values when working for the company. In the future, TSMC will continue to follow these principles and require all employees to do the same.”
TSMC is believed to have 56,000 employees and it has let workers go in the past for leaking trade secrets. But the largest number of employees it has fired at one time for such an offense was no more two which means that the seven employees fired was the largest number it has punished for leaking at one time.
Investors could used leaked information to trade the shares of TSMC’s customers like Apple and Qualcomm
TSMC recently announced a delay in the manufacturing of chips using its 3nm process node. The latter was expected to be used to churn out the Apple A16 Bionic chip that we expect to drive next year’s iPhone 14 series. Instead, TSMC will use the 4nm process node which theoretically wouldn’t deliver the same improvements in performance and energy-efficiency that a 3nm chip would.
Behind TSMC, Samsung Foundry is the second largest foundry on the planet and has been right behind TSMC in terms of process node capabilities.
